American Pharaoh (75 page)
With the election safely over, the truth about the housing summit agreement came out. Keane, the number-two man in city government
and Daley’s co-negotiator at the summit, declared on the floor of the City Council that there was no open-housing agreement.
“There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” he said during finance committee hearings on the city’s
1967 budget. When word of Keane’s statement reached King, he was outraged. “Hundreds of thousands of Chicago citizens live
in slums today awaiting the severities of winter,” King said. “Last summer they were given the hope that their hardship would
come to an end, that the slums could be eliminated, and that decent homes would be made available to all families in all neighborhoods.
Any attempt to destroy that hope is an act of cruelty and a betrayal of trust.” King insisted Daley now had an obligation
to speak out. “[B]ecause Mr. Keane so often seems disposed to speak for the entire city government, I think that Mayor Daley
himself should clarify his own position,” King said. “After all, the mayor praised the open housing agreement when it was
reached last August.”
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Daley did take a stand, but not the one the Chicago Freedom Movement had in mind. He agreed with Keane that the housing summit
had produced no enforceable agreement, although he did concede that there was a “gentleman’s agreement under a moral banner”
to address the concerns that were raised there. Once again, Daley was engaging in shrewd racial politics. By backing up Keane,
he was sending a clear signal to the white wards that they did not need to worry that the summit agreement would cause their
neighborhoods to be integrated. At the same time, his talk of a “gentlemen’s agreement” and a “moral banner” offered blacks
just enough that they could probably be convinced to continue to vote for the machine. Civil rights leaders were not impressed
by Daley’s carefully parsed expressions of support. In December, Raby complained publicly that nothing had changed since August
26, the day the agreement was reached. That would become a common refrain in the days ahead.
In the end, there were many reasons the Chicago Freedom Movement failed where the southern civil rights movement had succeeded.
Chicago was certainly more difficult terrain. It was harder to fight complex social ills like slum conditions than to challenge
the segregated buses and closed voter rolls blacks faced in the South. But much of the credit for defeating the Chicago Campaign
— and for taking the steam out of the civil rights movement as it tried to move north — belongs to Daley. His response to
King and his followers was shrewd: he co-opted their goals; he dispatched black leaders like Dawson and the Reverend J. H.
Jackson to speak out against them; and he refused to allow them to cast him as the villain in the drama. The housing summit
was Daley’s masterstroke, a way of ending the protests and driving the movement out of town in exchange for vague and unenforceable
commitments. “[L]ike Herod, Richard Daley was a fox, too smart for us, too smart for the press, . . . too smart for his own
good, and for the good of Chicago,” Ralph Abernathy would write in his memoirs. “Did we make a mistake in taking his word
and leaving Chicago with our signed agreement and our high hopes? I believe we did the right thing, even though the outcome
was bitterly disappointing.”
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The Chicago Campaign was nominally about open housing and slums, but it was also about something larger: a battle between
two very different visions of what kind of city Chicago should be. The Freedom Movement’s goal was what it called an “open
city,” in which residents would be free to live wherever they wanted without regard to race. When it came to development,
the civil rights activists wanted the emphasis to be on improving living conditions in the city’s worst neighborhoods. At
the same time, Daley was working to build a wealthier and more powerful Chicago, anchored by a revitalized Loop. Racial integration
was not necessarily inconsistent with Daley’s vision, but he saw it as a threat because it had the potential to drive middle-class
whites to the suburbs, and to discourage businesses from investing in and locating downtown. The defeat of the Freedom Movement
was a victory for Daley’s city of stable, middle-class, white ethnic neighborhoods, and a booming downtown. With King and
his followers out of the way, Daley could return to his work in building his city.
I
n late 1966, Daley was hard at work planning his reelection campaign. As usual, his allies weighed in early. On December 6,
the Chicago Federation of Labor, headed by his friend William Lee, endorsed Daley, pronouncing him “the greatest mayor in
American history.” Two days later, the machine slate-makers drafted him to run again. On December 29, Daley formally announced
that he would seek an unprecedented fourth term. Adamowski wanted the Republican nomination again, but Cook County Board president
Richard Ogilvie and the rest of the Republican leadership were against it. The party leaders were looking for a candidate
in the mold of John Lindsay, the dashing Republican-Liberal elected mayor of New York in 1965. They made overtures to a young,
charismatic bank executive, but when he turned them down, they offered the nomination to 23rd Ward Republican committeeman
John Waner. Waner, a wealthy heating and air-conditioning contractor, did not have much in common with New York’s WASP prince.
The son of Polish immigrants, Waner — who was born Jan Ludwig Wojanarski — did not learn English until the age of nine. But
Waner was a fresh face, he could make an ethnic appeal to the city’s large Polish population, and he had the resources to
finance his own campaign.
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The same day Daley announced that he was seeking reelection, Alderman James Murray announced he was not. Murray, who had served
in the City Council since 1954, was convinced he could not win again. Murray’s 18th Ward on the Southwest Side had become
a hotbed of white-backlash sentiment. His constituents had never forgiven him for sponsoring Daley’s 1963 open-housing ordinance.
The law was political window dressing, Daley’s effort to convince black voters that he was on their side when he was not.
But even that toothless law was too much fair housing for 18th Ward whites. And this year, passions on the issue of race were
running higher than ever: one Bungalow Belt alderman was campaigning as Casimir “I voted against the fair-housing ordinance”
Laskowski. Murray says he knew he was in trouble when he went to a civic association meeting in the ward to discuss mundane
neighborhood improvements. “A guy got up and said, ‘This guy would be a great alderman if he wasn’t such a nigger lover,’”
Murray recalls.
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Daley unveiled a new master plan for the city to coincide with his reelection campaign. The $6 billion plan, which had been
in development for five years, was the first comprehensive plan for Chicago since Burnham’s in 1909. It called for clearing
1,850 acres of slums, building 35,000 new units of public housing, adding 50 more acres to the University of Illinois at Chicago
campus, and building a controversial Crosstown Expressway. Unlike Daley’s 1958 plan, this one contemplated development outside
the Loop. It called for the city to draw up sixteen distinct development plans for neighborhoods across the city. At the time
of the announcement, though, only two of those plans had yet been drafted, for the University of Illinois area and the Near
West Side — both, as it happened, neighborhoods on the fringes of the Loop. Daley’s 1967 plan demonstrated how much the racial
climate in Chicago had changed since 1958. In the four years since his near-defeat by Adamowski, Daley had been sending clear
messages to white voters that he would protect them from black encroachment. That sensibility was reflected throughout the
1967 plan. Where the 1958 plan had spoken in code language about removing “blight” from the central area and moving in more
affluent families, the 1967 plan boldly stated its racial intentions on its first page. The city wanted to have a “diverse,
harmonious population,” the drafters wrote. But it was also seeking to make the changes necessary to “reduce future losses
of white families.”
3
Daley kicked off his campaign with a flourish. On January 4, he appeared in person at the city clerk’s office wheeling a handcart
with nominating petitions stacked ten feet high. According to his aides, the pile contained the signatures of 500,000 Chicagoans.
Waner, who was at the clerk’s office at the same time, had only 11,000 signatures. It was more than enough to qualify, but
the discrepancy was daunting. Waner said Daley had benefited from the tens of thousands of patronage workers and their families
who were pressured to sign and carry the machine’s petitions. In the privacy of the voting booth, he insisted, they would
vote Republican. In the end, Dick Gregory did not even try to get his name placed on the ballot. The word in political circles
was that this was just as well — that no matter how many signatures he had submitted, Daley would have made sure that the
machine-dominated board did not certify him to run for mayor.
4
Once again, Daley had to engage in a difficult racial balancing act. In his public comments on civil rights, he tried to appeal
to white and black voters at the same time, which often left him speaking in meaningless platitudes. “There are some who say
that we have gone too far with our community improvement programs, while there are others who say we have gone too slow,”
Daley said in a speech kicking off his campaign. “There are some who say that we have done too much for minority groups, while
there are those who say we have not done enough. It is important that we keep pace with the times.” In fact, Daley had good
reason to worry about his standing with both groups. For all of his success in defeating King and the civil rights movement,
it was not clear how white ethnic voters were feeling about him or the machine. If James Murray was now widely hated in the
18th Ward, Daley himself might not be much more popular. At the same time, Daley had to worry about defections in the black
wards. The most recent sign of trouble was that King had returned to Chicago on December 2 to announce that he would be sending
sixteen civil rights activists to town to staff a “massive” new drive to register black voters. King insisted that the drive
was non-partisan. “We do not endorse candidates,” he said. “We feel the people will be intelligent enough to vote for the
right candidates when they know the issues.” Still, the machine, which once had a lock on black voters, was nervous enough
that Daley refused to help with the drive. When civil rights activist Hosea Williams asked city officials to set up neighborhood
registration centers, he was turned down. “They said it would be too expensive,” said Williams. “They wouldn’t even give us
what we got in Birmingham!”
5
Daley was counting on the black machine to keep its voters in line, and most of Daley’s black supporters seemed eager to do
their part. On January 7, twenty-two black clergymen wearing Daley campaign buttons stopped by City Hall to endorse Daley.
The Reverend Clarence Cob, pastor of the First Church of Deliverance, said many blacks were confused about Daley’s record,
and that he and his colleagues would educate them. The truth was, despite the civil rights insurgency of the past year, there
was still a lot of life left in the old black submachine. A key factor in its staying power was its knack for co-opting anti-machine
candidates. In the 29th Ward, an undertaker named Robert Biggs had almost defeated the machine candidate in 1963. Ward committeeman
Bernard Neistein made Biggs the machine candidate in 1967, and Biggs was elected as a pro-machine alderman. Charles Chew,
who had been elected 17th Ward alderman in 1963 and then state senator on an anti-machine platform, had come around to the
view that his future would be brighter if he made peace with the machine. Chew was now a supporter of Daley and a critic of
the Freedom Movement — and he drove around the ghetto in a white Rolls-Royce.
6
On January 16, McCormick Place was destroyed by fire in the middle of a National Housewares Manufacturers Association exhibition.
The roof of the main exhibition center, which was as large as six football fields, collapsed. It was unclear how such a new
building could have burned so easily, and why it was built with no sprinkler system or fire walls. Daley said that the most
important thing was to ensure that the facility, which he credited with making Chicago “the convention capital of the United
States,” was rebuilt as quickly as possible. Within a day, he gathered the chairman, the general manager, and virtually the
entire board of the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority, at City Hall to announce plans to build a new McCormick Place
twice as large as the old one. Daley kept up his flurry of pre-election development work, personally presenting the city’s
proposal for fifteen miles of transit lines along the Kennedy and Ryan expressways to the Chicago Plan Commission, which immediately
approved them. Daley also announced some well-timed federal grants. Almost $1.3 million in federal funds had come through
for the social services center that the city and the University of Chicago had been planning for Woodlawn. And HUD approved
$15.5 million for five urban renewal projects, including the one Daley had been planning near the University of Illinois campus.
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